Examine the arguments in ‘the Normative vs. Empirical debate’ in the study of political theory. (2002)
The debate rests on David Hume‘s gap between is and ought. It became a quarrel over the discipline itself in the 1950s and 1960s, when behaviouralism claimed that only verifiable statements count as knowledge and normative theorists answered that a political science without values is blind.
The empiricist case
- Meaning and verification: logical positivism, popularised by A. J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic, 1936), held that value judgements express emotion and cannot be true or false. Political philosophy thus offered preferences posing as knowledge.
- Cumulative science: David Easton (The Political System, 1953) blamed traditional theory for historicism and for living parasitically on ideas a century old. He called for value-neutral, systematic theory that could be tested.
- Progress through method: surveys, quantification and replication would produce knowledge that holds whatever the researcher’s ideology. Robert A. Dahl (APSR, 1961) described behaviouralism as a protest that had succeeded.
The normative case
- Value-neutrality is itself a value. Leo Strauss‘s “Epilogue” (1962) argued that treating all values as equal ends in nihilism. Of the new science he wrote that it fiddles while Rome burns, unaware of either.
- Method has displaced purpose. Sheldon S. Wolin (“Political Theory as a Vocation”, APSR, 1969) attacked “methodism”: choosing problems because they suit available techniques, not because they matter.
- Political questions concern ends. Isaiah Berlin (“Does Political Theory Still Exist?”, 1962) argued that questions such as why anyone should obey are neither empirical nor formal. They survive because people disagree about ends.
- Frameworks carry values. Charles Taylor (“Neutrality in Political Science”, 1967) showed that apparently neutral explanatory frameworks favour some political conclusions over others.
The anti-positivists were themselves divided: Wolin and Strauss clashed in 1963, the former defending a democratic, historically grounded vocation against the latter’s classical natural right.
Attempts at synthesis
- Scientific value relativism: Arnold Brecht (Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, 1959) accepted that science cannot establish ultimate values. It can still clarify what a value implies, check its consistency, and test the means and consequences of pursuing it.
- Post-behaviouralism: Easton’s 1969 credo of relevance put values back inside research, conceding that choosing what to study is a value choice.
- Reflective equilibrium: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971) tests principles against considered judgements and general social facts, making normative reasoning disciplined without making it empirical.
- Empirically informed normative theory: field experiments, recognised by the 2019 economics Nobel to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, show what policies achieve, while normative theory decides which outcomes count as just.
The debate keeps returning. The Perestroika e-mail of 2000 revived the complaint against quantitative dominance. In India, Rajni Kothari‘s CSDS moved from behavioural surveys to a critique of Western modernity without giving up the surveys.
Conclusion
Both sides were right about what they defended and wrong about what they dismissed. Empiricism rightly insisted that claims about politics answer to evidence, and the normativists rightly insisted that evidence cannot choose ends. The debate is now less a war than a division of labour, but a lopsided one: science can inform the choice of ends and cannot replace it.